Hello! The Dresden Files RPG is a tabletop (pen & paper) game, meaning to play it in person you need the rules (a book), some character sheets (the pen/paper part), Fudge dice (six-sided dice with 2 +'s, 2 blank sides, and 2 -'s) and a group of people (typically 1-6 players, 1 GM or Game Master to run the game).
Pen and paper games are essentially a big game of make-believe - shared story telling between a group of people. You begin by creating a character to play (a Wizard like Harry, a cop like Murphy or almost whatever you could imagine). The rules are there so you can emulate the world you're playing in better and also to give you a framework for what's fair for all the PC's (Player Characters) and NPC's (Non-Player Characters, run by the GM).
For example, when kids play, one of them might say, "I shoot you with my laser" and another will say "Well, I have bounce-back power" and the first responds back "Well, I have SUPER bounce-back power!" and so forth.
The Dresden Files (or another RPG) might have the above powers, but they'll have a cost and your character would have to buy them with limited amount of points (the DFRPG) or your character would have to be a specific type of character to use it (like the Wizard class in D&D).
After you decide what abilities/traits you have and what your character's background is, the character sheet collects all this information.
http://www.evilhat.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/City-and-Character-Sheets.pdfAnd then comes the actual playing of the game. The GM comes up with a story, and the characters run through it like a maze. This is where the dice come in. Anytime you try to do something significant, you usually have to make a roll.
Let's say you're playing a Doctor. As one of your character attributes you might have an great Scholarship bonus of +4 (indicating you've reached a mastery level of ability). You might get a seemingly undecipherable codex as part of an adventure and translating it might require a dice check of 5. Fate Dice can give you any result from -4 to +4, so you'd have to roll the dice, add your +4 and try and get a 5. If you succeed, you'd decipher the codex with the GM telling you what was in it, if you failed you wouldn't understand it just yet.
I think the best way to get started would be to go to the above sub-board (DFRPG Play by Post) and look at the games people are playing online. Here's a link to an example game:
http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,39160.0.htmlBy this point, we've already finished the character creation process outlined in the books and the GM (bobjob) is running the story. Play-by-post games are a little bit different than how the game would run online, particularly the pacing, but it'll give you an idea of what the RPG is like.
Feel free to post with any more specific questions and I'll try to answer them the best I can.
